2025.01.15 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Peter Dews, Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel, Oxford University Press, 2023, 344pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780190069124.
Reviewed by Kyla Bruff, Carleton University
Questions concerning the differences between Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophical systems have always been of intense interest. This has been the case since Hegel decisively ended their friendship and collaboration by critically describing the early Schelling’s concept of the Absolute (the identity of identity and non-identity, or A=A [Dews, 75–76]) as the night “in which all cows are black” in the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 (Hegel 1977, 9, cf. Dews 75). Schelling’s Absolute, on Hegel’s account, was an abyss of darkness within which the dynamic development of real difference did not emerge. In contrast, Hegel thought his own dialectical system could lift difference out of the night, capturing the “reality of the finite” and the dynamic process of becoming (77). While Schelling quickly moved on…
Read the full article which is published on Notre Dame's Philosophical Reviews (external link)
